As I was reading It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, the experiences and words really reminded me of my younger sister. She is on every social media outlet, and is a big fan of twitter. She’s a huge fan of One Direction and has met fellow fans that have become really close friends because of twitter. She doesn’t like me going on her twitter. She even has 2 twitters: a safe family-friendly and school-friendly twitter and a nerdy, one direction, ranting-type twitter that she only shares with her closest friends.

I, as an annoying older sister, sometimes go on her not-allowed-for-everyone twitter and I see her cussing sometimes. I used to cuss at her age, and I was very like her in a lot of ways. But I still get mad and sometimes scorn her for it! And I know that’s bad. But I want her to be better than me (even though I know cussing is NOT a big deal!).

I am twenty-three now and do not relate to her teenage self anymore. We relate in so many other ways but I know I should just let her act as her teenage self. I sometimes tell her not too binge watch TV, even though I used to do that, too. It’s a weird thing to change mindsets with years. Teenagers cuss, teenagers binge watch TV, and they should be left alone.

I know she wants to be herself, and talk about shows with her friends, and cuss when she’s really mad – therefore I am all for teenagers being teenagers.

On a different note, with teenagers having such a huge presence online, they’re definitely influenced by the media. My sister constantly sees people talk about different issues on twitter and comes to me to have a conversation about it and I think that’s awesome. While I hope teenagers don’t easily buy into everything said online and approach it with a critical lens, I know that teenagers are more informed than ever! So even though I still don’t like the cussing and binge TV watching, I’m glad there is an outlet for discussion!

The first chapter in It’s Complicated, “why do kids seem strange online?”, took an interesting perspective on what content teens post online. It seems that all you hear is that teens should be more careful about what they post online, but Boyd looks at the situation differently. Boyd presents that although it is important for teens to be aware of what they are posting, the problem is not just the teens themselves, but also the way the platform is set up. Teens often have no way of knowing which of their social circles will be seeing a post, but they have to pick a group to target with the post. By giving the analogy of the speaker targeting different groups he spoke to, compared to TV, it became clear this is not only a problem for people online. Posting content via social media is just the newest way this problem has been encountered.
Although this book was published just last year, this chapter made me think of ways that social platforms have already improved this. Google plus was created with the purpose of creating a social network that can be directed at certain groups. On Google Plus, connections are sorted into circles like family, friends, work, etc. When something is posted on your page it is very easy to select which circle or circles the post is directed to. Other popular social platforms have since adopted this idea, so certain posts can have a limited audience, but it is not as clear cut as the circles on Google plus.
On Facebook, there is now the option to hide certain posts from certain friends. Although this tries to recreate the idea of targeting an audience, I don’t think it achieves that goal as well as Google plus. By excluding specific people from a post, it seems more like the poster is trying to hide something from specific people instead of just directing a post to a certain group. The key to understanding teens online the way that Boyd does is to understand that teens post items online targeted to a specific group, not everybody except a couple people.

Boyd says that today our online identities more closely reflect who we are in real life, the personas are tied together unlike the way users would “type themselves into being” in the beginning days of the Internet. It’s true to an extent, but Boyd has failed to consider the use of social media to legitimize yourself to yourself and to your real life peers.

“The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves make us who we are” (Kurt Vonnegut maybe). As a 15-17 year old girl on social media, my entire identity revolved around making myself seem as beautiful, mysterious, and desirable as possible. This was especially palpable through my Instagram and Twitter. I never bought followers, but I did my thirsty best to gain them through skanky hashtags and red-lipsticked photos. Once I hashtagged “like4bjs”. It’s laughable now but I’m not ashamed to admit it. During the time in adolescence where popularity and beauty seem like the two most important things in life, the crushing, Lolita-esque desire to feel love is manifested online. The affection you feel is artificial and fleeting, your heart pumping adrenaline as you refresh your photo again and again to see how many likes you have. The amount of followers, likes, reblogs and retweets you get makes you feel like some sort of goddess. Best of all, you know your school friends are jealous of your thousands of Instagram followers. Instagram and Tumblr “fame” have replaced playground popularity. Even if you’re the biggest outcast in your high school, getting love on social media creates an allure around you that fools your IRL peers into thinking you are actually cooler than them.

Then, last month Instagram deleted spam accounts, including fake profiles who have never posted a photo but follow hundreds of thousands. The penny-a-follow people. It was a glorious day. The people who had previously seemed like Instagram forces to be reckoned with were reduced to naked bundles of shame. The carefully manufactured online existence was shattered as people were forced to admit they were not as cool as pretended to be. It was the online equivalent of a queen bee takedown, akin to the stabbing of Ceasar or the fall of Regina George.

Imagine the Molly Ringwald Teen Queen Trilogy (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty In Pink). Now imagine the same thing with the internet. In Pretty In Pink, Molly would own a successful Etsy shop, selling her own wares, defining the “it” aesthetic and rocketing herself out of wrong-side of the tracks poverty. In Breakfast Club, she would be a secret Tumblr bulimic, an active member of the Emo/ Thinspo community where she would vent the feelings she couldn’t express in life (everyone in the Breakfast Club would be hardcore Tumblr addicts). The luddite rejects new technology, but if we had had this tool 20 years ago you can bet teens would use it for the same thing. Online personas are simply another story we tell ourselves about the people we think we are and the people we want to be.

In “Personal Connections of the Digital Age” Nancy Baym comments on a variety of views and opinions that try to distinguish and label the role technology plays in the social sphere of human existence. Nancy groups the differing sentiments into two categories: Technological determinism, and Social Construction of Technology. Technological determinism claims that technology determines the extent to which humans can use it, thus altering human traits and characteristics. On the other hand, Social construction of technology argues the opposite, in that it views technology as merely serving an inherent human need, something that would persist with or without the emergence of socially geared technological devices.

However, siding with either category of thought does not sufficiently address the issue of properly weighing and understanding the nature of our social uses for technology. A perfect sub-topic of technology that parallels this discussion is the image, and its prevalent usage in the digital world for the purpose of human interaction. In using the two extremes Nancy Baym discusses, technological determinism and social construction of technology, one can easily see the ways in which the digital image can be argued for either side. But the simple grouping or labeling of the image as being one or the other ignores the subtleties and nuances that are necessary to understanding this relationship between the human and the digital image. Though I would like to argue that technology and its relationship to the image does assume a role in which both tend to the social needs and impulses of humans, something it definitely does, I think the way humans categorize their interactions with it is troublesome and ultimately problematic. The greatest qualm I have with digital technology is its love of the image. I find the relationship between digital technology and the image as worrisome solely because people lack the ability to correctly interpret or read images/photographs. Like language, the photograph is a linguistic instrument who’s doubly articulated existence is subtle. To read the subtleties of the image is to make an extra effort to interpret an entity that one can appear to have been adequately read almost instantaneously. However, the emphasis and dominance placed on our visual receptors is deceiving humanity. As images become more and more easily accessible, a result of their scalability, and if we continue to lack the skills to critically examine images, what will become of our more critical thinking processes or nuanced understandings and relationships to things and ideas. Has technology honed in on a human weakness? Lacking the skills to critically examine the digital image, humans would continue to perpetuate stereotypes and misinterpretations that could eventually harm social and cultural groups and possibly even further divide and segregate people as being similar or dissimilar. How would this affect our societal understandings of global cultures?

Growing up in the age of technology, I believe we really need to take a step back to take a look at how things are. Most people our age constantly forget that other generations simply did not have the resources that we have today. Technology defined many key events in the coming of age for our generation whether we acknowledged or participated in them or not. Although my mom was pretty adamant about not letting my brother and I play video games very often, and did not allow us to have Game Boys when we were young, so both of us never really developed a taste for it (yet I do speak only for myself), I still remember  the nights where my friends would stay out all night waiting in line for the new Xbox, PlayStation, or Call of Duty game just so they could play it through the night and skip school the next day. Despite that I was never one for video game consoles, I spent my equal share of time on the Internet while growing up. I was a huge fan of Neopets and also created a MySpace when I was eleven (although you had to be thirteen–which resulted in the deletion of the page when my mom found out, and then later the creation of a new page on my thirteenth birthday). Although since I have gotten older, I definitely have lost that “passion” I had for the social media. I think I have kinda realized why I liked it exactly. The human connection through the websites is really what drew me in, and I guess I found that the human connection made IRL (in real life–Baym, chapter 2) is much more satisfying and real, at least in my opinion. Although this apparent distance that is apparent with human connection via the Internet is not necessarily a problem with it, but rather a problem with how people use it, like Baym mentions in book. The Internet doesn’t distance people from people, people distance people from people.

This reminded me of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood which speaks of the advancement and prominence  of technology, especially in my generation. The main character argues that Facebook, social media, and technology are turning humans into anti social robots, although I would place the blame on humans after reading Baym’s argument.

“Y’all need to get off your phones and in a book!”

Growing up in the age of the Internet has brought many new forms of communication with intricate meanings and relations, in which numerous communities imagine this technology to be the furthering cause of our worlds subjective anxieties and youth exploitations. Nancy K. Bayum describes in Personal Connections in the Digital Age, the connections between technology and society; the Internet works as an agent, or medium method that users entrust both their personal security and business. Often this form reflects the minds, products, and actions of the users. There are many fears that Bayum mentioned when discussing technological determinism, including but not limited to a loss of place, moral decline, relational vulnerability, and anonymity. Although many of these fears can be true and many cause a sort of anxieties in society, these should be looked at on a more on a yin and yang like scale. Cyberspace can become a sphere of togetherness where the dividing boundaries lessen and potential horizons broaden, such as in the case of race, age, and gender. There are many cases of modernity, in which humans fear change, but we are creatures of evolution and adaption, we must not fear progress, we must counterbalance it with education and information. We are given almost unlimited access to the world around us, but the true pressure revolves around how it will be used individually.

 A few weeks back Elite Daily’s Melanie Lee, posted a blog about the effects of this now instant world. There is a push for only the absolute best that then created an attitude where enough is never enough. When the promoted media is accessible to the all, even those who daily walk on eggshells and maybe lack self-stability, the agent could be looked at as a loaded gun just waiting for someone to hit the trigger. Lee describes it as a longing for immediate gratification, in which come would go to great lengths just to receive a form of positive feedback. This technological development has undeniably changed both our society and culture. It is now just a matter of educating the youth and others, to respond and interact with this powerful medium in a healthy way.